The 2023 NCAA basketball tournament, otherwise known as March Madness, starts Thursday, March 16. The tournament will host 68 colleges from across the country over a period of three weeks. The tournament will conclude on April 3 at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. The tournament is held at several regional locations. March Madness is one of the most-watched sporting events in the United States.

The main reason March Madness has become as popular as it is is because of the millions of people that fill out brackets each year. The tournament averages 20.5 million viewers per year (via Statista). Nearly 100 million people fill out brackets in an effort to predict the perfect bracket. Nobody has ever picked a perfect bracket, and it likely will never happen. Due to the sheer amount of matchups, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are 1 and 9.2 quintillion. March Madness is widely thought of as the best postseason in all of the sports.

This year’s tournament field was revealed on Sunday, March 12. The field contains schools of all sizes and locations. Alabama, Houston, Purdue and Kansas are this year’s top teams. The field will be reduced from 68 to 16 teams in just the first weekend of the tournament.

The champion of the 2022 tournament was the Kansas Jayhawks. Kansas has the opportunity to be the first team to win back-to-back championships since Florida in 2006 and 2007.

When the season started in November, over 350 D1 programs fought for the championship. Just four months later, only 68 remain. Over the next month, the number of teams will decrease until just one remains the champion.